IP Host-Remote

First Step to the Rural VoIP Future

As rural carriers make their first moves toward VoIP, they are being buffeted by conflicting forces: the lure of the economy and new, more competitive services enabled by VoIP, and the hurdles of cost and regulation blocking the route to the new technology.

Trying to balance these forces, carriers are deploying VoIP judiciously, beginning with architectures and elements that closely resemble what they already use. Foremost of these is host-remote architecture, a strategy for serving widely dispersed remote areas with one TDM switch.

With the geographical challenge of serving customers dispersed over a wide area, rural carriers are heavy users of host-remote configurations. “In rural America, 75 percent of all switches are in a host-remote topology,” says Bob Kersey, vice president of product management at CopperCom Inc. “They have a main switch, and then they have dumb remotes in remote communities.”

But this seeming no-brainer migration is not as simple as it might appear at first glance, because what is critical is how this is implemented. Does the service provider merely substitute IP trunking in an architecture that is otherwise comfortingly familiar, or does the service provider look forward to a new IP architecture that can provide not just cheaper trunking or even VoIP, but also the full range of multimedia IP communication services that will be available in the future?

“If I were a small company, I would start to go down the path of moving the entire network infrastructure to support IP,” says Yaron Raps, VoIP practice lead at BusinessEdge Solutions Inc., a consulting company in communications. Rural carriers should keep an open mind about access technologies, he says, and prepare to use multiple access media, such as cable or even WiMAX. “I would look into infrastructure that would be an open architecture,” Raps continues, “and would look into different [access] media. One could be copper and another cable and another wireless.”

For service providers choosing to take the first step to replace their host-remote TDM switches with IP technology, there is a wide choice of vendors offering IP host-remote products to replace their TDM deployments.

But, in fact, the use of the term host-remote is mostly a reassuring nod to the past, familiar terminology for something that is technologically very new. So-called IP host-remote products, in fact, are softswitch-gateway combinations with software to accommodate the needs of rural carriers.

“The key thing is for the remote to have standalone switching capability,” says Andy Randall, vice president of marketing at MetaSwitch. “So not just any gateway will do, because it needs that capability at the remote site.”

CopperCom, which recently added the CopperCommander software to enable remote management of the infrastructure, provides a product in which intelligent remotes all have call-control capability and can peer with other remotes or the central switch. This configuration also can support out-of-region competitive plays.

MetaSwitch offers a host-remote configuration of its products. A trunking gateway (such as the MetaSwitch MG3510) is combined with a call agent (the MetaSwitch CA9020) with softswitch functionality to replace the TDM switches at both the central and remote locations. Different levels of functionality can be deployed at any location, even completely independent and redundant capability.

Siemens Communications Inc. is offering a configuration of its Next Generation Exchange (NGE) products to support the migration of host-remote architectures without disrupting services. The NGE replaces TDM host-remote with the Surpass softswitch and multiple media gateways. Each of the gateways has the ability to provide basic functions independently if connection to the softswitch is lost. The NGE also supports PacketCable standards, important for the many independents that have cable systems.

The product also is ready for service providers that wish to take the next step to VoIP to the customer. The NGE package supports a wide range of IP features, and includes a Web portal toolkit that enables service providers to develop custom portals to support their services.

As straightforward as an upgrade to IP host-remote appears, service providers have to weigh that move against other demands, such as migration to VoIP for end users. Many are postponing that step until changes in regulation give them similar financial terms for termination to VoIP customers as they have for TDM. “When we talk to service providers, they have a Rubik’s Cube problem in front of them, and how to solve it is a problem because many things run asynchronously to each other,” says Kersey.

Also, migrating the backbone to IP but keeping the subscriber links TDM means the service provider will be operating a hybrid network for some time.

“How do telcos really work? They work sequentially; they do one thing and then another,” says Kersey. “Our system provides to them ability to do that in sequential manner. They can put in a CopperCom host switch and remotes and keep the same services they have today and, as plans make sense, they will be able to upgrade the network where it makes sense, whether in the infrastructure or all the way out to the subscriber.”

Kersey adds that most rural customers are not just replacing a TDM backbone. “The biggest excitement from customers is the ability to connect into a Level 3 (Communications Inc.) or Qwest (Communications International Inc.) or Global Crossing in order to greatly reduce outbound call cost.”

As service providers make the move to replace host-remote, they should keep in mind the many steps and migrations that follow.

“I agree that host-remote should be the first step,” says Raps of BusinessEdge Solutions. “But I would keep the design and architecture so that they can always tap in to additional kinds of access points and types when those are ready,” for example WiMAX, he says. He is concerned that some rural telcos’ migration is not open enough to accommodate new access types, such as WiMAX, which he expects “in the next two years.”

Also, just moving to VoIP “can just make voice cheaper, and it becomes a commodity play. You want to avoid being commoditized and want to get a platform that allows you to differentiate things, things that you can develop and introduce to subscribers and that no one else can.”

The most important element to ensure an open system is SIP signaling, which will support a variety of endpoints and access networks. But using SIP alone is not enough without a network architecture to support it, such as IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem).

IMS is the current big buzzword in telecom, as wireless operators try to bring their networks into the world of IP services. However, IMS has real relevance for the rural carrier because it is really about services, not just fixed-mobile convergence.

“I see IMS as a concept, and that is how it is evolving in cable standard organizations and in some of the wireline organizations,” says Raps.

“It is bridging a single session across various networks to multiple access devices and allowing a subscriber to access and use any IP service. It starts today from VoIP, but it will never end up there. It will be video, IM (instant messaging), mobility and a whole range of other services that have not yet been invented.”

Randall agrees that IMS is a key architecture for moving beyond mere host-remote replacement. “Some architectures allow you to build more things on top of the voice architecture,” he says. With IMS “you have a single subscriber database that has not only softswitch data for voice services, but also video and data services, and it is all in one location pulling everything together.”

IMS architecture involves not just SIP or specific codecs or specific access networks, but rather entire systems including operations support and business support that enable service providers to design, provision and bill for new kinds of services without completely replacing their networks.

Product cycles may be as short as 12 to 18 months rather than the years that have been the standard in telecom, and service providers have to be able to accommodate that rapid pace of change.

Indiephile

During fiscal 2005, almost $2.2 billion will be made available by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) for loans and loan guarantees for the construction, improvement, and acquisition of facilities and equipment for broadband service in eligible rural communities. So, many vendors are anxious to win acceptance of their products on the RUS List of Materials.

Among the recent additions to the list are Pannaway Technologies Inc.’s Service Convergence Network system, which supports triple play services for both copper and fiber broadband deployments. ADC, meanwhile, recently got its OmniReach Fiber Distribution Terminals added to the RUS list. The products, which are the first RUS-approved FDT solutions, allow rural carriers to centralize splitters in the field, and provide physical layer access to feeder and distribution networks with integrated bend radius protection, logical cable routing, and complete physical protection for cables and jumpers. Allied Telesyn just announced that its iMAP 9100 multiservice access platform was added to the RUS list. According to the vendor, iMAP 9100 is the first 1RU system of its kind, supporting fiber and copper simultaneously, as well as POTS and VoIP applications.

Broadband wireless access vendor InfiNet Wireless Ltd. last month introduced FCC approval of its 5.8GHz spectrum products designed for the rapidly growing segment of alternative carriers and WISPs expanding operations into smaller cities, towns and rural areas across the United States. The company, which is headquartered in Moscow, says it was one of the first companies in the world to pioneer broadband wireless access technologies to create metropolitan area networks. It has customers in Afghanistan, China, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Poland, Spain and the United States.

In an effort to provide inside-the-beltway policymakers exposure to small, independent telecommunications providers in rural America, the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association’s (NTCA) Foundation for Rural Service (FRS) recently hosted key staffers for five congressional leaders and members of the FCC on a three-day journey to Texas and New Mexico. The purpose of the trip, which began Aug. 21, was to help educate policymakers about the operations of — and challenges faced by — independent telcos that connect rural America with the world.

Trip participants included Randy Clarke, attorney advisor to the FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau; Jeremy Marcus, legal counsel for the Wireline Competition Bureau Chief; Jodi Detwiler, legislative director for U.S. Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas); Merritt Myers, legislative assistant to Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.); and Chad Wykle, legislative assistant to Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W. Va.).

Highlights of the site visit to the Southwest included:

• A tour of ENMR*Plateau Telecommunications, Clovis, N.M., which serves 13,000 customers in rural eastern New Mexico and western Texas.
• A visit to Five Area Telephone Cooperative of Muleshoe, Texas, which serves nearly 1,500 customers in a 2,000-square-mile area spanning six counties in west Texas, and whose customer density is less than one subscriber per square mile.
• A meeting with several NTCA member company general managers, during which the group discussed issues and trends in rural telecommunications and explored the challenges faced by community-based providers serving the remote rural areas of the Southwest.

Meanwhile, a new research report published by Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va., says much of the economic benefits of broadband already have been realized, and gains from its further extension to rural areas probably are not sufficiently large to justify government ownership of facilities. The report, The Residential and Commercial Benefits of Rural Broadband: Evidence From Central Appalachia, commissioned by the West Virginia Development Office, reports that on a statewide basis, there is no statistical correlation between access to broadband and economic growth.

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